BJP’s ethnolinguistic cleansing campaign an anti-national project

The BJP’s anti-national campaign is aimed at exploding Indian nationhood by fomenting fissiparous energies.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has covered itself in ‘glory’ all over again, rolling out a programme to persecute Indians who speak Bengali — in other words, Bengalis who are citizens of India. This kind of ethnolinguistic attack should occasion little surprise given the fact that the BJP is the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which has been accused of being a fascist enterprise.

We need to note that native speakers of Bengali form the second-largest linguistic group (8.85%) in India, going by the 2011 Census of India, the last enumeration pending the still suspended decadal count of 2021. The persecution of such a large group of people is going to have consequences, which we will examine after looking at some of the premises of this linguaphobic campaign of persecution.

BJP leader Amit Malaviya, ironically one of the party’s Bengal ‘minders’, was skating on thin ice when he claimed in a post on X: ‘Bengali denotes ethnicity, not linguistic uniformity.’ He also posted: ‘There is, in fact, no language called “Bengali”…’. To buttress this fallacious argument, he wrote: ‘Delhi Police is absolutely right in referring to the language as Bangladeshi in the context of identifying infiltrators. The term is being used to describe a set of dialects, syntax, and speech patterns that are distinctly different from the Bangla spoken in India. The official language of Bangladesh is not only phonologically different but also includes dialects like Sylheti that are nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis.’

The use of the word ‘phonologically’ is in this context a meaningless malapropism, perhaps cribbed from an Internet site. The fact is that there is no uniform language in Bangladesh either. There is an identifiable language called Bengali, used in both Bangladesh and West Bengal that were, despite the thuggishness of sanghi ignoramuses, one politico-administrative unit 78 years ago, and has been a socio-cultural unity for centuries; and remains one. If Malaviya’s arguments were used for his own state-incubated mother tongue, Hindi would disintegrate into shrapnel. That’s the whole point — no language is uniform, and to make uniformity a condition for recognising the integrity of a language would paradoxically deny it an existence.

You don’t have to be a linguist to get this. You just need two brain cells to rub together and take a train from Howrah to Delhi.

Malaviya’s spurious linguistic theory is dangerous in practical terms, especially because it has real-world consequences of the kind that he was trying to defend. That came in the form of a letter crafted by the Delhi Police, which called Bengali the ‘Bangladeshi national language’, a ‘Bangladeshi language’ and, simply, ‘Bangladeshi’.

Of course, the context is provided by the attempts by BJP stormtroopers and the minions of the regime at the Centre and its counterparts in the states to terrorise Bengalis by rounding them up, incarcerating and torturing them, and illegally pushing them across the border into Bangladesh. This is a campaign of ethnolinguistic cleansing that aims, inter alia, at fixing the electoral rolls in West Bengal in favour of the BJP, a task which sections in the Opposition allege is facilitated by the Election Commission of India.

The attack on Bengalis is not just against a linguistic minority, but against a religious one as well, given that most migrant workers being hounded are Muslims. It’s also obviously against poor and marginalised people who have to travel the country to make a livelihood. But this is not inexplicable given that the current regime is sectarian, in hock to crony capitalists, and fascist.

The fallout of this campaign, decried by parties, including the Tipra Motha of Tripura, a BJP ally, and socio-linguistic communities across the country, could be devastating. It undermines the diversity of a subcontinental formation, which is the foundation of a federal polity that holds together a nation-state that is of relatively recent vintage.

India’s nationhood, as distinct from the state form, derives from a voluntary submergence of subnational identities to the hegemonic one — from constructing oneself as an ‘Indian’ first. The BJP’s anti-national campaign is aimed at exploding this by fomenting fissiparous energies. This fissiparity is most sedulously and effectively whipped up in what the BJP considers its heartland, in the bastions of Hindutva and Hindi chauvinism.

Hindi-speakers are not a majority, though Hindus are, but neither accepts the Sangh parivar’s version of majoritarian intolerance, because there are no homogenous communities of Hindi-speakers, Bengali-speakers, Hindus, and Muslims in the first place.

(Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.